“I keep them in a box,” he said. “At work. In my desk.” He wouldn’t look at me. “I figured someday she’d want to find me. And when she did, I’d have all of it.
Every birthday I missed. I’d be able to say, see, I never stopped. I was always your dad. I just wasn’t allowed in the room.”
Eleven years. Eleven years I shared a bed with this man and he never once said her name to me. He let me think he was a guy who didn’t have kids, who shrugged when ours never came, when the whole time he was grieving one he wasn’t allowed to hold.
I should’ve been angry. Part of me was. He lied, technically, every single day, by leaving a whole person out. I told him that. I said, “You should’ve told me. Eleven years.”
He nodded. He didn’t fight me on it. “I know,” he said. “I didn’t know how. Every year it just got harder to bring up.” Then, quieter, “And I think I was scared you’d look at me the way Janelle did. Like I was somebody who lost his own kid.”
I didn’t have an answer for that. I still don’t.
We didn’t fix it that night. There wasn’t anything to fix in one night. I asked to see the box, and he brought it home the next day from work, this little cardboard thing, and he set it in front of me and let me open it myself. Thirty-six tiny charms wrapped in tissue. Each one labeled with a date in his handwriting.
The heart with the R on it was the first one he ever bought. The tissue around it was soft from him taking it out and putting it back.
I’m still here. He’s still here. We talk about Rosie now, which is strange and good and sad all at once. He keeps the box in our closet instead of his desk. We don’t know if she’ll ever come looking. He still buys one every month.
I helped him pick the last one. A little compass.
I keep telling myself it means he plans to be findable. Honestly though, some nights I lie there and wonder if either of us really believes she’s coming. And I don’t know what’s worse. That he spent three thousand dollars on a daughter who may never call. Or that for one whole day, I was sure he was just cheating, and somewhere underneath all that fear, a part of me almost wished he had been.
